It is Sunday morning, and our world champion Chicago Bulls are getting ready to play another game against the Mormon-backed Utah Jazz. As people all over Chicagoland (the world, actually) gather around their television sets to watch some more fancy footwork in The Last Dance, it will kind of resemble reaching for the last slice of pizza. It will taste so good, but then it will be gone.
And this coming just a few days after Ginger Spice left the Spice Girls.
And a few more days than that since Frank Sinatra died.
And Barry Goldwater.
Now some words for those who think all of this in some way signifies the end of the world as we know it.
Get over it.
If you find such events upsetting, get over it. Things change all the time, and the older a person becomes, the more he or she begins to realize that change is ultimately good, and, in the realistic sense, unchangeable.
The biggest millionaires on the Bulls are expected to be making major career changes after the Tussle With Saltville ends.
Scottie Pippen may be plying his talents elsewhere, demonstrating to the world that without Michael Jordan, he is just a pretty good basketball player.
Jordan himself, while retaining his halo, will be doing something different next year.
Phil Jackson, who is like a Zen monk except rich, will return to Big Sky Country for contemplation on life, death, and the faces of dead presidents in his bank account– not a bad way to pursue enlightenment.
The other guys either will stay here or wander off, the most lucid ones ending up talking about basketball on radio or television and the less eloquent ones disappearing, except for championship anniversary reunions. Dennis Rodman, who has proved that one of the biggest differences between hate and love is geography, will try something completely different and probably not do it well.
So what?
Things change. If not always for the better, we usually seem to adapt.
When one of the Spice Girls quit, some overzealous fans described the loss as the biggest musical disaster since the Beatles broke up. Well, maybe to them it was. But remember, despite Yoko’s attempts, the Beatles didn’t really break up until a crazed gunman shot down John Lennon, shattering dreams of a reunion forever. (Forget that record put out a couple of years ago featuring John via his answering machine tape joining the other three in an uncomfortable attempt to resell a bunch of songs everybody already owned.) The next reunion for them awaits the afterlife.
Then there was Frank Sinatra, who, along with Barry Goldwater, sort of defined his era, although Sinatra actually spanned a lot of eras, while Barry just set himself up as a historical bad example. When Sinatra died, he did it his way, checking out in the early morning hours and cheating the hated newspapers of a chance to get the news in their doorstep editions. Goldwater died as a gris eminence, a senior statesman, which is another way of saying a politician who got his butt kicked when he was in his prime but who became a venerated icon after he no longer could be effective.
When Richard J. Daley passed, everyone said they would never see his like again. A few years later, along came Richard M.
When Harold Washington died, everyone said they would never see his like again, either. They haven’t.
Reader’s Digest took the table of contents off the cover and in its stead ran a photograph of a woman firefighter, the twin sister of a former Baywatch babe. In addition to probably upsetting the bathroom habits of millions who had become accustomed to looking over the familiar table of contents for an article that could be read in one sitting, the Reader’s Digest change also upset people who just don’t like change.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives,” an often-quoted statement that doesn’t make a lot of sense in itself but seems to incorporate the idea, at least, that high points come early but always are outlived by life itself.
Many of these big change moments in recent weeks have been wrapped in the vision of the coming millennium, signifying that the end of the century has something to do with them.
Well, to many of us, the fin de siecle is becoming a douleur de derriere, being blamed for a lot of things that are the fault of nobody.
The Bulls are either going to win or lose in the next week and a half, and then the team of the decade will scatter into the wind, into memory and into their respective bank vaults.
There could be another Spice Girl on the horizon.
Old Blue Eyes may be gone forever, but Old Ski Nose (Bob Hope, you youngsters) is, at this writing, still around.
That girl on the cover of Reader’s Digest is kind of cute, and the Dow Jones has again closed over 9,000.
That’s just the way things are–they change.
Don’t moan. Don’t mourn. Don’t cry for me, Argentina.
Remember, “Cheers” was replaced by “Seinfeld.”
